Annal: 2000 World Fantasy Award for Collection

Familiar to Charles de Lint’s ever-growing audience as the setting of the novels Memory and Dream, Trader, and Someplace to Be Flying, Newford is the quintessential North American city, tough and streetwise on the surface and rich with hidden magic for those who can see.

Now de Lint (“one of the world’s leading fantasists”—Toronto Star) returns to this extraordinary city for a third volume of stories set there, including many never before published in book form. Here is enchantment under a streetlamp: the landscape of urban North America as only Charles de Lint can show it.

Stephen R. Donaldson’s unique talents have placed his work alongside that of J.R.R. Tolkien and established him as a writer with the rare ability to expand readers’ imaginations. Now he presents a magnificent new collection of eight stories and novellas—three of which have never before been published.

This outstanding volume commences with the fablelike title story, “Reave the Just,” which highlights one of Donaldson’s favorite themes: the individual’s power to overcome adversity. This collection also introduces the morbid, soul-taking hero of “Penance,” the mysterious beggar woman in the dark fairy tale “The Woman Who Loved Pigs,” and the pampered antihero forced to make a choice between virtue and vice in “The Djinn Who Watches Over the Accursed.”

Boasting exotic settings and suspense fueled by sudden plot twists, Reave the Just and Other Tales is a testament to Stephen R. Donaldson’s talent to spin unforgettably spellbinding stories, and the astonishing scope of his mastery of magic and myth.

Hearts in Atlantis, King’s newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.

In Part One, “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror.

In the title story, a bunch of college kids get hooked on a card game, discover the possibility of protest…and confront their own collective heart of darkness, where laughter may be no more than the thinly disguised cry of the beast.

In “Blind Willie” and “Why We’re in Vietnam,” two men who grew up with Bobby in suburban Connecticut try to fill the emptiness of the post-Vietnam era in an America which sometimes seems as hollow—and as haunted—as their own lives.
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Darrell Schweitzer, author of The Mask of the Sorcerer and editor of Weird Tales collaborates with macabre artist-writer Jason Van Hollander on a series of remarkable fantasies, variously grotesque, horrific, ethereal, and darkly comic. Several of these form a cycle set in as-yet undiscovered countries where the common men have thrown down the gods and decadent nobles reach new heights of ecstasy and terror with the drug hanquil. You’ll also encounter a wrenching yet romantic ghost story set in the American Southwest, an intimately personal tale of the Cthulhu Mythos and the lingering legacy of Dunwich; plus a dance of death; and a house haunted by the terror of eternal life.

Here are all the stories Schweitzer and Van Hollander have written together, a unique blending which makes these two the most successful collaborative team since Burke and Hare.